A Navajo Inauguration, Minus a New Leader.

Accessed 24 Jan. 2015

By JULIE TURKEWITZJAN. 16, 2015

FORT DEFIANCE, Ariz. — Crisp suits. A roaring band. Beaming first-term lawmakers. The inauguration held here this week for the newest government of the Navajo Nation held the trappings of a typical passage of power.

Conspicuously absent, however, was one key player: a new president.

The Navajo Nation, a semiautonomous sovereign state that suffers from chronic poverty and unemployment, is now facing what many are calling its greatest political challenge in a generation: a power vacuum caused in part by a requirement that its president be fluent in the Navajo language, which is prized as a cultural legacy and for its vital role in transmitting military secrets during World War II.

One candidate heading into the November election, Chris Deschene, whom many tribe members thought could successfully lead the Navajo, was disqualified for his lack of fluency, prompting a fight that led the tribe to postpone its 2014 presidential election not once, but twice.

Although the most recent president, Ben Shelly, was sworn in at a brief, private ceremony on Tuesday, he lost his re-election bid and will serve only temporarily until the tribe resolves its leadership crisis.

“It’s shaken the very foundation of Navajo government,” said Moroni Benally, a public policy scholar who ran unsuccessfully for Navajo president last year. Without a strong executive, he said, “How can we move forward?”

The question hung over the inauguration on Tuesday, held in a high school basketball arena here. A traditional healer took the stage, urging reconciliation after months of division over who should be allowed to run for executive office. “Our president and our leaders, let’s stand behind them,” he said in Diné, the Navajo language. “In beauty we walk,” he continued, repeating the phrase three more times.

But tribe members in the stands said the talk did little to salve their wounds. In October, the presidential election had pitted Joe Shirley Jr., 67, a former two-term president known for overhauling the Navajo Legislature, against Mr. Deschene, 43, a former Arizona state representative with a guy-next-door demeanor, a savvy social media campaign and an inclusive definition of the Navajo identity.

For many members exhausted by years of seemingly intractable poverty, Mr. Deschene seemed to offer a way forward.

Then, days before the election, Mr. Deschene was disqualified, after a lawsuit called his Diné fluency into question. The disqualification unleashed a tit-for-tat legal battle that consumed the three branches of the tribal government, with the Legislature eventually voting to nullify the primary and start over.

Navajo voters began to tire of the soap opera. “It’s a mess,” Mr. Shirley said in a telephone interview. He did not attend the inauguration.

The nullification was quickly challenged in tribal court, and it remains unclear when an election will be held, who will run, and whether the fluency requirement will remain. The absence of a new president leaves in place Mr. Shelly, 67, who was faulted by voters for, among other things, attending a Washington Redskins game, where he sat alongside the team’s owner, Dan Snyder. (Many Native Americans consider the team’s name offensive.)

The Navajo Nation, comprising some 300,000 members, has the largest reservation in the United States, a vast region of towering red rocks and scrubby yellow plains that is roughly the size of West Virginia. It is run by a three-branch government that is comparable to a state body, with notable exceptions: The tribe does not have a constitution and is instead guided by a set of codes and a document outlining traditional values.

Central government is not a Navajo concept, but was instead imposed on the tribe by the federal government in the 1920s. While the tribe has had some form of central governing body since 1922, the existing system was put in place in 1990, after a corruption scandal led to deadly riots and then democratic reforms. Today, the president manages most of a $500 million budget and acts as a diplomat to states, other tribes and the federal government, serving a term of four years.

In recent weeks, supporters of Mr. Deschene (pronounced DEZ-cheney), angered that their ballots in the primary had been discounted, have begun to organize voter’s rights groups across the reservation, with meetings drawing wall-to-wall crowds, and elders reportedly crying in their seats. Protesters have marched at least six times outside the legislative chamber, calling for the removal of a judge who ruled on Mr. Deschene’s disqualification.

To protest the election’s delay, Rebecca Nave Cling, 47, has taken to wearing the same shirt every day, featuring the face of Annie Dodge Wauneka, a Navajo lawmaker celebrated for an unflagging can-do spirit. “The people are hurt,” said Ms. Cling, a substitute teacher. “We have no faith in our democracy.”

And across the reservation, the uproar has given Mr. Deschene — with his ponytail, earrings and hefty leather wrist cuff — a celebrity aura not normally associated with Navajo officials. At the inauguration on Tuesday, after 24 legislators and various board members were inducted, Mr. Deschene was mobbed by cellphone-wielding teenagers. “They believe their votes should count,” he said. “No one respected their voice.”

As the ceremony ended, women wearing head scarves and traditional turquoise barrettes mingled with towering men in cowboy hats. Amid a screaming jazz band and camera flashes, Kauy Bahe, 14, and his uncle, Kellen Joe Bahe, 32, sat in the stadium seats, wearing matching expressions of disappointment.

They had come to watch a family friend take office. “We want change,” said Kauy, an eighth grader and aspiring app developer. “But our government is not giving us change.”

Mr. Bahe jumped in. “We’re happy for our friend, but we should be inaugurating a president.”

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A California Rebel in Napoleon’s Court | We’re History

Accessed 13 Jan. 2015

As his forces wore down the last of Confederate resistance around Petersburg, Virginia, General Ulysses S. Grant contemplated launching another invasion – this time thousands of miles to the west. His target was Sonora, Mexico, where a former California senator by the name of William M. Gwin had hatched an ambitious plot that threatened to pull several other nations into the vortex of the American Civil War.

In a confidential letter to one of his generals on January 8, 1865, Grant fretted over the “great danger” posed by Gwin, “a rebel of the most virulent order.” According to Union intelligence, Gwin had established a colony in Sonora, where he began attracting Confederate-sympathizing Californians. Grant believed that Gwin might use these forces to invade California itself and thus give new life to the Confederacy.

In such an event, Grant wrote, he “would not rest satisfied with simply driving the invaders onto Mexican soil, but would pursue him until overtaken, and would retain possession of [Sonora] until indemnity for the past and security for the future…was insured.” Mexico would thus become a new theater in the war, with truly global significance.

Gwin’s Sonora plan began not in Mexico, nor in the Confederate states of the South, but in the court of Emperor Napoleon III of France. On the pretext of securing payment for a national debt, Napoleon had invaded Mexico in 1861 and installed a paper emperor, Maximilian, by the spring of 1864. To move forward with any colonization of Sonora, Gwin therefore had to first convince Napoleon that the enterprise was worthwhile.

That he did. Working with French high officials and the emperor himself, Gwin detailed an ambitious plan to settle the mining district of Sonora with American prospectors and trigger Mexico’s version of the California gold rush. By early 1864 he had won the official approval of Napoleon and set off for Mexico to make this dream a reality.

As Gwin’s plan unfolded, Union and Confederate officials alike tracked his movements with growing interest. Although Gwin was acting independently and not as a Confederate agent, many now believed the future of the rebellion hung on his actions in Mexico. This was no mere mining venture.

To many Unionists, Gwin had achieved nothing short of a rebel coup in the court of Napoleon. Gwin may have professed neutrality, but his Mississippi plantation, his Confederate connections, and his previous record indicated otherwise.

As California’s leading politician through the 1850s, Gwin had established a reputation as a proslavery stalwart. Born in Tennessee, Gwin hewed the Southern line while serving California in the Senate, and he ensured that his fellow Californian congressmen often followed suit. When war broke out, his son enlisted in the Confederate cavalry, while his daughter moved to Richmond and became a Confederate belle. Gwin himself was arrested under suspicion of treason in 1861. He was released after a short confinement, but the stigma of disloyalty stuck.

Throughout the war, Unionist newspapers traced treason in Gwin’s every move. The Sacramento Union regularly blasted him as a “hoary-headed old traitor.” When rumor reached the Alta California of Gwin’s Sonora plan, the paper speculated on the prospect of a new rebellion rising “from the debris of the Southern Confederacy.”

General Irvin McDowell, commander of the Union’s Department of the Pacific, was equally apprehensive about Gwin’s recent movements. As war drew to a close in the East, McDowell assured Grant that his department remained on high alert to the emerging Confederate threat south of the border. McDowell even sent a force to southern Arizona as a safeguard against the feared invasion from Sonora.

Such vigilance was justified not only by Gwin’s reputation, but also by other pro-Confederate activity in the Far West. California harbored an active secessionist element, especially in the southern part of the state. McDowell’s predecessor in the Pacific department predicted that 32,000 “restless and zealous” secessionists stood ready to detach California from the Union at a moment’s notice.

Although no such force materialized, smaller insurrections periodically plagued California. In Los Angeles, Southern sympathizers – who probably constituted a majority in the city – paraded Confederate insignia and defiantly sang “We’ll Hang Abe Lincoln from a Tree.” Closer to Sacramento, a former member of Quantrill’s raiders launched a guerrilla campaign in an attempt to plunder funds for the Confederate treasury. The California raiders’ success was far from spectacular – a stagecoach robbery, a series of failed heists and two deadly shootouts – yet their actions deeply unsettled California’s Unionist population. This was merely a taste of what could be expected from the far larger threat in Sonora.

For their part, some Confederates saw salvation in Gwin’s plan. Leaders in the South understood that his colony would naturally attract like-minded rebels. Through Gwin’s diplomacy and Napoleon’s protection, the rebellion might gain a second lease on life, an escape valve in the West as the Confederacy’s prospects faded in the East.

Napoleon’s involvement was especially promising to Confederates. The French emperor did little to disguise his Southern sympathies, including turning a blind eye when his subjects sent money and munitions to the Confederacy. He may have stopped short of providing direct aid to the rebellion, but his support of a slaveholder in Mexico was perhaps the next best thing.

Predictions of Union disaster and Confederate revival ultimately came to naught. Although Gwin went to Mexico with Napoleon’s imprimatur, the newly installed Mexican Emperor Maximilian refused to follow through with the plan, rightfully fearing that Gwin would detach Sonora from his fledgling empire. Without the cooperation of Maximilian, Gwin was only able to attract a small cadre of would-be colonists to Sonora. And by the summer of 1865, he abandoned his plans and returned to the recently reunited U.S.

Upon his return, Gwin was arrested and taken under guard to Fort Jackson, Louisiana where he would spend nearly eight months in prison – a longer sentence than virtually any Confederate high official other than Jefferson Davis. Although Gwin repeatedly disavowed his Confederate affiliations, his prison term was proportionate to the anxiety he inspired amongst Union commanders.

While Gwin languished in prison, his old patron, Emperor Napoleon III of France, withdrew the last of his troops from Mexico. Mexican nationalists captured Maximilian in May 1867, and executed him one month later.

After his long imprisonment, Gwin fared much better. He eventually returned to California, where he became an active political powerbroker until his death in 1885, even helping his former Confederate son win election to the state senate. Although his search for Sonora gold failed, he launched several lucrative mining ventures in postwar California and established himself firmly within San Francisco’s social elite. Yet for some, Gwin remained a symbol of a more troubled time in the nation’s past, when civil war threatened to spill over international borders and the slave South reached into the courts of emperors.

About the Author

Kevin WaiteKevin Waite is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, where he’s writing a dissertation on proslavery visions of empire in the Pacific world. When not tracking down slaveholders in 1850s California, he enjoys trekking up mountains and reading about the history of mountaineering.*

Note: The article text was minimally edited by Mr.V for classroom use.